Burning Up

New Zealand is experiencing a heat wave. We are flocking to beaches...diving for water bottles or staring stupidly into the sky and saying what is that yellow thing?

Over in the publishing blogoshere there is disquiet...Sony has a nice little promo going on with the 20p (38cNZ) ebook and Amazon matched it coz that’s what they do and Sony doesn’t look like stopping this anytime soon....Ummm. This could have a major effect on everyone’s bottom line. FutureBook looks at the race to the bottom and the millons being squandered/earned/ redistributed...amongst the publishers who signed up for this promo.

Burning up Twitter this week is the news that Barne’s and Noble, America’s largest book chain is beginning to close stores and tightening their bricks and mortar footprint. By the end of the decade they will have slimmed down by a third. Mike Shatzkin takes a look at the implications.

In Amazon’s latest earning figures they forgot to put in the figures that everyone wants to know. Ebook sales means how many units over/under print ? and What about the bite Apple is taking in illustrated books because everyone really wants an iPad for kids books? and What does this all mean for hardware...and content providers. PaidContent check out the answers to these burning questions.

If you sign up for anything Amazon writer related...be aware The Amazon orb can burn you if you are not careful. This is a post about one writers baaad journey with Amazon and the lessons learned.

Mark Laurance was faced with a difficult situation on Reddit earlier today when he explained exactly what lowly income a writer gets and was told by several readers that they were now going to buy one of his books after discovering him through pirated books. Check out this fascinating stream of comments where readers defend piracy and Marks response.

Agent Rachelle Gardner looks at the tricky topic of story vs craft in her latest blog post which has racked up nearly 100 comments within 24 hours. Acquiring editors are all over the place with whether they want a great story and hang the writing craft or whether the craft has to be just as tight as the story before they will look at it.

Jody Hedlund looks back at life when she had one book published....and life now (5 books) and What She Wished She Knew Then.

If you could, would you distribute your books through the largest UK book distributor? Did you know it is now McDonalds? Publishing Perspectives  takes a look at McDonalds UK move. Could we do it here and who would lose out?

Joanna Penn is back in love with print! She tells why she came back to it and why for her it makes financial sense.

IndieReCon has released their schedule for the free online conference happening from 19^th Feb. Everything you wanted to know about independent publishing...three days... 39 speakers....Inspired by WriteOnCon...

In Craft,

Raising the stakes in your novel in the first 50 pages... When you get into the planning stages you need to have a good handle on complications. A good post on what you should be looking for.

Adding complexity to your characters...Why do your villains act the way they do...

Tracking time in your novel...If you don’t do it you can come to a very sticky situation...Here are some tips to keep up to speed.

How is your voice? This great post looks at refining your writing voice. Some great exercises here.

Karen Woodward is taking a close look at the StarBurst way of writing...In this post she tackles the classic heroes journey and the significance of Obi Wan Kenobi.

In Marketing,

How do you discover your books brand? And then what do you do....

The Market Within is a nice blog post for Children’s Writers to contemplate...after all their target market doesn’t buy the books so how do you engage with the buying wallets....

How do you know when you are a success? Angela Ackerman of the Bookshelf Muse has a great post detailing the signs...You could be a success and you don’t even know it...

Futurebook has a nice post on ways to optimise and monetise your social strategy in 2013. It sounds dire but if you have a business then this is very much worth a look. Immediately applicable to writers....

To finish,

11 ways to support a fellow writers book...I’m proud to be guilty of a few of these. Last week I was in a big chain bookstore carefully looking for fellow writers books so I could turn them...and found some other writer must have got there before me....They were all shining, face out, to the buying public.

Check out this interview with short story writer George Saunders on the Colbert Report...why short? Doesn't America only want Big Stuff? Gotta laugh!

maureen

pic: Fire  / Ben Watts  Flickr

E-books, Shooting for the Moon?

I’m baaccccck.

The kids are gearing up for school and as I write this the kitchen table is covered in adhesive book covering.

The topic for this week is books...E Books...You don’t need to cover them for a start.

If you do a quick search on the internet on any topic chances are that someone has written an e-book on your search term.

There are websites selling e-books about writing e-books and how they became millionaires doing just this.

If you are unsure about the whole e-book phenomenon and its place in modern publishing I will attempt to explain it. (remember I’m just back from holiday and for all I know my brain might still be there.)

Electronic books have enabled many people to call themselves authors. Anybody with a word processing program can write a book and post it on the internet. Things get slightly trickier when you ask for payment for the book.

As any author knows writing the content of the book is hard but the make or break for a book is marketing. In the marketing of a book, key decisions on Appearance, Distribution/ Publicity and Price determine whether the book lives or dies

These decisions are not taken lightly in the print and paper world and they should not be taken lightly in the e-book world.

David Meerman Scott has a great article on How to write an e-book on his website webinknow.

Appearance means layout, design, font, cover art these are the bare bones for e-book readability.

Distribution/Publicity can be handled with dedicated websites, advertising, blogging, articles, testimonials all driving viral virtual traffic to the book.

Price is the hot topic in e-book world. This week Apple launched the i-Pad and took its big anticipated step into the e-book reader market. Never mind that the i-Pad is being billed as a big i-Pod without key features like a camera for video or a phone, the e-book readers are now becoming mainstream instead of a geek candy.

Of course if you are going to shell out $499 US for the i-Pad you want to have some thing to read on it. This week the price stoush between Amazon, the worlds biggest e-book store and Macmillan publishers have raised eyebrows as Amazon pulled all Macmillan books in their preemptive strike to force Macmillan to back down on its pricing of e-books alongside their paper books. Macmillan is wanting to sell e-book copies of their print books at very similar prices on the day of print publication. (Amazon backed down last night.)

Richard Curtis predicts that this will be the turning point for publishers and authors.(Royalties of 20-25% tho-it is to dream Richard.)

Opponents of the high price of e-books point out that publishers are not paying for printing, paper warehousing, distribution etcetera on an e-book so the price shouldn’t be so high. Of course the poor author in this probably doesn’t see an increased royalty on an e-book in this model. This then starts the author thinking well maybe I could just publish an e-book myself and get all the profit. If you have a niche that is unprofitable for a mainstream publisher, that could be the best option, investigate it.

Going down this route you need to be aware of DRMs, EPUB and other acronyms to make your brain explode but it could lead you to a whole new earning platform and knowledge is power.

(DRM=digital rights management-buy one download only, no sharing with your friends or other digital media like i-Tunes music tracks....EPUB= dedicated software that converts your content into e-reader format so you can sell it on Amazon, Adobe 6.5plus)

Children’s book authors are still reliant on mainstream publishers as e-books with great graphics interface are still in development but this will change in the next few years with the refinement of e-book readers. (Think picture books like Xbox games on an e-reader.)

2010 the beginning of another decade which will see huge changes in publishing...

Meanwhile in geekdom Obama’s plan to decimate space exploration as a short term cost saver has sent strong signals to their space science community that their government is not behind them.

To put this decision in context Marcel Williams of New Papyrus magazine knocked some figures together when the Augustine commission released its findings in August last year.

Marcel asked-So what should President Obama do?

At the height of the Apollo program, the NASA budget reached$33 billion a year in today's dollars, nearly twice as large as NASA current budget. NASA's $17 billion annual budget represents less 0.6% of the total Federal budget while the US Federal government is spending nearly a trillion dollars annually on defence related purposes. So a $3 billion annual increase to the NASA budget would be extremely tiny relative to the overall Federal budget.

The underline is mine...a trillion dollars- think what that could mean to education, health, the UN food programme....

I personally agree with the comment on the bottom of the cosmos magazine article yesterday.

I predict an upsurge in science fiction writers in India China and Japan as they take the global lead in space exploration and fuel their children’s dreams of space.

maureen